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GruppoRito

Clinical references to the group work with children and adolescents: body language

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Abstract
In this paper we explore the body dimension of group dynamics, the body language that expresses and signifies the affects. Some clinical vignettes involving a group of children and a group of adolescents are presented to exemplify the relationships as they unfold through action capable of giving a communicable form to thought. In this exploration of a field of collective forces, where both the known and the unknown are met, we observe the movements generated by Read more

Adulto

The presence of the adult in the groups of children and adolescents: the specificity and the differences

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Abstract

The relationship between adult and children or adolescents in therapeutic groups is the central theme of this paper which highlights the different modes of perception of the adult therapist by children or adolescents in the group. Several considerations about it are inspired by personal experience of participants in relation to children aged between 7 and 10 years and participating adolescents aged between 14 and 16 years. In particular, attention focuses on the role attributed to the adult therapist and the perception of the latter where there is a parental relationship to the central reference and where it has instead been moved to the background in a more Read more

Adulto

The first session of a children’s group

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Abstract

Seven children are sitting around the table in silence, there are four boys and three girls aged between nine and ten years old. Every now and then they give each other a stealthy glance and carefully observe the small room in which we are sitting. There is no furniture to catch the eye, except a large blackboard, that stands out against the white walls…. They’ve been sitting like this for ten minutes with a decisively expectant air. This is their first session of group psychotherapy, I tell them that we are going to share a common experience and all together we will try to understand what is going on between us. In order for this to happen I go on, they can say anything that comes into their minds. They continue to sit silently, motionless, only their legs are moving restlessly under the table. Every time I start a new group I am always a little anxious and I ask myself as they probably do too, what’s going to happen ? I have already met them several times, alone or with their parents, so I am already familiar with their problems: inhibition, sleeping difficulties, enuresis, and attention disorders are just Read more

Adulto

Adult therapist in the adolescents group

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Abstract

The therapist’s function in a group of adolescents can’t be kept out of consideration from one’s own mental disposition, experience, cultural references and from one’s own adolescence. The teen-agers themselves are able to recognize the leader’s psychological profile and to challenge the adult-therapist attacking his or her vul-nerability. Before discussing the subject, it is important for me to specify that I work as a therapist in a public psychiatric structure in Rome. In this context, I hold  positions in the institution as an administrator and as a therapist. The patients expect many things from me: they would like a comfortable room, with nice furniture, while at the same time maintaining total availability. Often patients who use public services are guided by some fantasies: the ambulatory is seen like a big good mother that can offer many things, not particulary punitve and that is ready to receive everybody,a structure that functions like a large-meshed net. The operators are often trusted to by the fantasy to be omnipotent and to be very good in their work because they have many years of experience and because they have seen many patients. All this, unavoidably, brings the risk of running into frequent disappointments, devaluations or idealization of the therapist. In this congress it is important for me to investigate which functios are brought up by the group of Read more

Adulto

Parents and therapists as co-authors of children’s mental health in the Gin-Gap groupal technique

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Abstract

For its members the family is a mixture of both health and illness and children are the carriers of this either at a manifest or at a latent level. In this paper we are going to resume one of the developments we had in the psychotherapeutic Gin-Gap method’s theory and technique. Method in which the children’s and the parents’ therapeutic and groupal work took place in parallel. We are going to report about our participation as staff experts and supervisors in a Clinic that takes care of the community which depends from the Autonomous University De Quertaro that is in the suburbs. Our work mainly used the Gin-Gap method with community’s children and Read more

Adulto

The adult and transformations in the group with children: from chaos to the game

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Abstract

The paper discusses the specific elements of clinical work with children in groups: some of these elements are meeting with the chaos, with the primitive emotions and the bodily involvement. Go through and deal with the analytical model these elements is the genesis of any possibility of designing a game that can be shared in the group game. The presence of the adult and his role as the guide, when you work inside the game requires the ability to regress and to immerse themselves in no way to begin to translate thoughts into the language of bodies in motion, noise and excitement, which draw just the beginning narrative fragments. When the conductor resist stopping in K -, can then re-emerge with a building sense that it allows the structuring of a story that the group shares. This path analytic model applied to Read more

Adulto

The adult and the therapist in an adolescents group: new object and transferential object

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Abstract

The psychology of groups and certain structural dynamic elements of their functioning are common to all groups. However, there are some variables that change according to the emotional needs and developmental tasks connected to the age of the individuals that comprise such groups. The basic feature that clearly distinguishes therapeutic groups for adults from groups comprising children or adolescents is asymmetric union, that is, the concomitant presence of an adult or adolescents. An adolescent views the leader of a group as an adult before he perceives him as a therapist, and this immediately gives a specific connotation to their relationship. In all adolescent therapeutic groups, sooner or later the therapist is asked about his age, his physical decline or his aging. The adult in a group of adolescents is the physical witness of time, of the age difference and thus of the difference between generations: this conjures up the thought of aging and makes death present. Indeed, to have access to an adult identity, the adolescent must accept changes in his body and sexuality. He Read more

Adulto

The therapist, an adult seeking his place in the group

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Abstract

This article describes the role of the therapist within groups of children, highlighting the natural tendency of recent research and aggregation of peer relationships. The creative potential that arises from this type of relationship proves a useful tool for growth and acquisition of skills management and troubleshooting tasks and in particular the peer group reveals an important relationship context and can stimulate the creative aspects and development, to a greater extent than in relationships with adults in the family. The therapist in the group will tend to try to take this attitude, reassuring but not proactive, in order to stimulate free expression and respect of children within Read more

Senso

A home for the dragon

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Abstract

Di Giovanni has called the minimal playing unit “ludeme” (2005). The agglomerates of “ludemes” give life to the scenic thinking by going through the playing body. When Anna Baruzzi (1979) spoke of therapeutic groups with children (developmental age), she described working with emotions as “giving a home to the dragon”. One of the functions of the leader in a therapeutic group of children is to facilitate and witness the process that evolves through the transformation from action into playing and, only later, from playing into words. It is clear how the therapeutic work in a group of young children cannot leave aside playing all together, which includes the involvement of the therapist him/herself at a body level. The bodily engagement becomes the first home that is able to welcome the dragon – that is, the hot emotions. To give a home to the dragon is the same as to provide Read more

BionPaint

Bion in the nursery. The Three steps of an intersubjective theory

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Abstract

The author analyses Bion’s works evolution in regard to the relation between intersubjectivity and symbolization. Three books mark this evolution: Experiences in groups, Learning from experience and Attention and Interpretation. Firstly intersubjectivity is the field of symbolisation, secondly the condition of it and thirdly the cause of it, they are both so closed that they are condemned to move together. The same vignette, each time interpreted, illustrates in a nursery these three progressive manners to consider Read more

SeuratAdolescenti

From the top to words: conduction and transformation in a therapeutic group of children

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Abstract

In my experience with groups of children (beginning age 4-5 years old, children with an intellective level in the average and with development blocks more or less important: sometimes I also included a child with a psychotic personality structure) I noted that the conductors have different functions, according to the group’s different moments, functions that I will try to illustrate through the history of this group. I would like to specify that these functions, in a developmental spiral model, cross each other and overlap, allowing the group to pass and the integrate itself from a sensorial, motorial, corporeal communication modality of affects to verbal communication modalities, using, as a bridge, the transitionality of playing. On a technical level in the expression they are free (playing, drawing, words, etc.) in a work trim in which the conductor himself can intervene in an active way, if the children ask his participation in playing and in moments in Read more

SeuratAdolescenti

Reality and fiction for the therapeutic couple

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Article already published in the Notebook n. 14 – July-December 2001 of the Institute of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy of Milan edited by the Pisa-Rome International Polygraphic Institutes

Abstract

The necessity to have a precise time and a limited place where the group processes could take place, is a fundamental requirement for the survival of the group. This is to say that a stable setting with clear limited space must to be respected and offered to the group and to the therapeuthic couple’s mind. The group allows some important dynamic movements for the adolescent, allowing the displacement of the infantile unsolved dependence conflicts in regard to their parents on the group of peers. This permits the working-through of the object-relationships in function with the relationships connected with actual experiences and unsolved conflicts Read more

sogno e gruppo

Children who dream in groups

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Abstract

Working with a group of children borders on an oneiric experience, a tale, a cloth so complex as to make it hard to pick out the warp and woof of the dream. The group and its members rarely “relate” the dream; they tend to “dream” the dream. What follows is drawn from an experiential group of eight Read more

PieroSogno

The Problem Solving Function of Dreams in Children’s Groups

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Abstract

In this paper I will be referring to two dreams. The first dream was told by a little girl aged ten and a half, in a group that has been going for three years now, and is held in my rooms. The second was dreamt by a girl aged nine and a half who is a member of the same group. She told it to her mother who referred it to me. I am describing these dreams for a particular reason. Above all I wish to emphasize the centrality that I believe the problem solving function (and the narration that results from it) has in the dreaming Read more